


End Where I Begun

by nezvmii



Category: No. 6 (Anime & Manga), No. 6 - All Media Types, No. 6 - Asano Atsuko
Genre: A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, Introspection, Light Angst, M/M, Pre-reunion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-14
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-08-23 18:41:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16624367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nezvmii/pseuds/nezvmii
Summary: Four years and vast distance can change a person, but for some, old habits die hard.





	End Where I Begun

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the No.6 zine (@no6zine on Tumblr and Twitter).

Four years and vast distance can change a person, but for some, old habits die hard. It was with this thought that the dark-haired figure trekked through the unpaved streets, hands tucked into the pockets of his leather jacket and dingy gray scarf pulled over his chin. Nezumi had first found himself in this small town only a few weeks prior, and its striking resemblance to West Block was likely what convinced him to stay for longer than he normally would have considered. As he passed dilapidated buildings and rag-clad figures, he half-expected to encounter Inukashi, or Rikiga, or even… He shook his head abruptly and quickened his pace.

Nezumi reached the rundown hotel he was currently calling home. It was more of a proper hotel than the poor excuse of an establishment Inukashi had run back in the day. At least he had an actual bed here, rather than some mangy mutt to rest his head on. It was only a short walk away from the local theater where he had taken up a job. Rehearsals for their production of  _ Hamlet  _ ran late, as they were apt to, so he was left walking home in the dark. He already knew the play like the back of his hand and could recite every line with ease, but the rest of the cast was not quite as proficient.

Emptiness waited for him in the small, drab room on the second floor. He threw his backpack on the squalid hardwood and his coat and scarf onto the bed. A series of small squeaks caused his silvery gaze to fixate on the bed as two creatures burrowed through the thick fabric of his discarded scarf. Tiny noses peeked out from the folds, and then the two mice slowly emerged to greet Nezumi. He put his hand out to them and they scurried to him, nudging his fingers affectionately with their noses. Moonlight and Cravat were the names they had been given. However, Nezumi refused to refer to them by something so ridiculous.  _ Usually _ . Sometimes, as he spoke softly to the mice, he would catch himself just after the names left his lips.

After greeting the mice, he paced the short distance across the room to the window. The musty stench of the room and the weight of its emptiness were nearly suffocating. He needed air. Jiggling the half-broken latch, he opened the window and let the night in.

Nezumi stood at the open window for a while, a cacophony floating into the room: the bark of a nearby dog, the quiet strumming of a distant beggar’s guitar, rambunctious laughter and the buzz of chatter from the streets below. He couldn’t help but wonder if, perhaps,  _ he  _ was doing the same, wondering if one day Nezumi would once again appear through his open window like he had that first night over eight years prior. A sigh escaped his lips. He did that a lot lately. He would inadvertently find himself thinking about the boy he left behind four years ago, and his thoughts would become tangled, and then he would sigh in longing for what he had abandoned when he left No. 6. He breathed in the stale night air of the slums and stepped away from the window.

Nezumi dug a worn book out of his bag. He had picked it up a few towns ago and, despite having read through the anthology of poetry cover to cover more than once, he could never bring himself to leave it behind. He pulled a wooden chair over next to the window and, praying the rickety legs would hold beneath his weight, took a seat. His fingers delicately skimmed the yellowed pages. He flipped the book open to one of the poems, denoted by a makeshift bookmark. The mice, sensing he was about to begin reading aloud, scrambled onto the windowsill and perched at attention. Nezumi cleared his throat before softly reciting the title: “ _ A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,  _ by John Donne.”

He didn’t read for pleasure much anymore. For the mice, it was always a special treat on those rare nights he would choose to read aloud from one of his books rather than tirelessly reciting his lines. He often found himself missing his vast collection back in West Block. Now, he picked up a book here and there on his travels, but the nomadic lifestyle he had adopted in the last four years limited what he could keep.

Nezumi took a breath and began to read. “ _ As virtuous men pass mildly away, and whisper to their souls to go, whilst some of their sad friends do say the breath goes now, and some say, no. _ ” His voice cracked ever so slightly as the last word left his lips. The image of a body strewn across the dirt, crimson seeping through the white button-down where the bullet had pierced flesh and eyes staring vacantly at the ceiling flashed across his mind. The sight was burned into his subconscious, deep as the scars that marred his back. He would never accept that it was anything less than his fault. The white-haired boy had lived in the end, thanks to Safu and Elyurias, but what if he hadn’t? Nezumi’s bitter hatred for the parasitic city of No. 6 nearly cost him the only thing he held dear.

But again, he had survived after all. The evidence had been clear as day when their lips met outside the crumbled walls of the fallen city, his soft and warm and full of life beneath Nezumi’s. “ _ So let us melt, and make no noise, _ ” he continued softly, the corners of his lips twitching into the barest of bittersweet smiles. When he had cupped the other’s cheek, stroking his calloused thumb across that snakelike scar as he told him that he would be leaving, he was expecting tears and desperate pleas for him to stay. And yet… “ _ No tear floods, nor sigh-tempests move, _ ” and it was true, for as Nezumi walked away, there was not a peep behind him. He did not want to think about the tears that were likely shed later in private. “ _ ’Twere profanation of our joys to tell the laity our love. _ ”

Nezumi told himself time and time again that he wouldn’t cry. He had never really been the crying type. Mostly, he just didn’t have it in him to bother. And yet, as the years wore on, there were nights he couldn’t help it, and he would find himself curled into a ball beneath the thin sheet, body wracked with muffled sobs and the mice nuzzling his cheek in silent comfort. Inukashi would laugh in his face if they could see how weak he had become. It was all because of that first night in the pouring rain, bleeding and damp, when he saw that window thrown open and heard those freeing screams released into the storm. “ _ Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears, men reckon what it did, and meant; but trepidation of the spheres, though greater far, is innocent. _ ”

It wasn’t that he regretted leaving, per se. Nezumi had spent nearly his entire life alone. When this eccentric boy from No. 6 came crashing into his life—or, rather, Nezumi into his—it threw his perpetual solitude off balance. The first time, he felt the long-forgotten warmth of human contact. The second time, before he was even conscious of what was happening, an unbreakable bond had formed. With this bond came complicated thoughts and feelings that he desperately needed to sort through. 

For so long, his sole purpose had been to orchestrate the downfall of the holy city. Now that the walls were in ruins, exposing the filth within, it seemed he had no purpose. But the longer he stayed away, the more he realized he  _ did  _ have a purpose—and that purpose was waiting for him thousands of miles away. “ _ Dull sublunary lovers’ love (whose soul is sense) cannot admit absence, because it doth remove those things which elemented it. _ ” The chair creaked as he leaned back and crossed his legs. “ _ But we by a love so much refined, that our selves know not what it is, inter-assured of the mind, care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss. _ ”

Doubt plagued him occasionally. Was it selfish to think that the boy with the snakelike scar would have waited four years for his return? He did it once before, but the first absence after their brief meeting as children held no promise of reunion. And yet this time, perhaps, back in No. 6, the boy— _ man _ , Nezumi reminded himself—still held onto their vow. “ _ Our two souls therefore, which are one, though I must go, endure not yet a breach, but an expansion, like gold to airy thinness beat. _ ” It would be cruel, Nezumi thought, to break their promise sealed with a kiss. He never specified  _ when  _ he would return but knew there would be some anticipation of a four-year pattern, and much disappointment if he did not make a reappearance soon. September had passed and the chill of winter was already taking hold. Since that month marking the anniversary of their first meeting, thoughts of that night and of the months living together in West Block became increasingly more prominent in his mind. “ _ If they be two, they are two so as stiff twin compasses are two. _ ” He was beginning to accept that he would never be able to detach himself from these memories, and he wondered if the same was true of the other. “ _ Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show to move, but doth, if the other do. _ ”

After the collapse of the city, the boy likely helped to rebuild. With his intelligence and idealism, it wasn’t difficult to imagine him taking on an important role within the city’s new leadership as they transitioned out of an era of corruption. Nezumi had no doubt in his mind that the new No. 6 would be a much better place than the so-called “utopia” it superseded. Throughout all of this, he wondered how often the other thought of him; there was no question in his mind whether he even thought of him at all. “ _ And though it in the center sit, yet when the other far doth roam, it leans and hearkens after it, and grows erect, as that comes home _ .”

Nezumi wanted to see him again. He  _ needed  _ to see him again. Here, in this town that so closely mirrored West Block, he was quickly discovering that four years had been more than long enough to clear his head. “ _ Such wilt thou be to me, who must, like th’ other foot, obliquely run; thy firmness makes my circle just, and makes me end where I begun. _ ” He would finally return home—not to No. 6, or to West Block, but to the  _ person  _ he called home.

“Shion,” he said, speaking the name aloud for the first time since he left. Moonlight and Cravat’s small ears perked up at the sound of Shion’s name, one they, too, had not heard in so long. As a light breeze blew through the open window, ruffling his dark hair, he reached up a hand to release it from his ponytail. His hair finally reached shoulder length again, just the way Shion liked it. The mice scuttled closer in anticipation. He reached his hand out to stroke their soft fur. “You want to see him too, don’t you?” he murmured.

In the end, the changes he had endured were all because of Shion. Inukashi would call him soft, but Nezumi would say that, perhaps, he was just more  _ human.  _ That night over eight years ago initiated a transformation in both Nezumi and Shion that neither of them could ever have predicted. But Nezumi could express, with absolute certainty, that four years and thousands of miles of distance had done absolutely nothing to change his feelings for Shion.

Reunion would come soon after all.


End file.
